It would be easier to cheer heartily at the British Conservative Party’s electoral triumph last week if the party leader, that guy who demanded that W. H. Smith stop selling chocolate oranges, didn’t have approximately the gravitas of the Earl of Ickenham. Still, perhaps Iain Murray is correct in his assessment:
After Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair, in September and October last year he was riding high. If he’d called an election then, Brown would have seen Labour re-elected with a bigger majority than Tony Blair and he would have destroyed David Cameron’s claim to be a viable alternative. This concentrated the Conservative mind wonderfully. Starting at the party conference in October last year, the Tories started advancing genuinely conservative policies on tax, crime and education, for example. Yes, Brown proved to have a political ear as tinny as Al Gore’s, but the Tory decontamination of the brand (Cameron’s genuine acheivement) meant that people reacted well to Conservative policies for the first time in 15 years. Boris [Johnson, the new Mayor of London] is a solid conservative (with a small ‘c’) and Labour attempted to use this to paint him as the bastard son of Cruella de Ville and Lord Voldemort. It didn’t work. Nor did people turn to the Liberal Democrats. People are not just tuning out Labour, they are willing to listen to conservatives advancing conservative thought again. And about time, too.
The Wall Street Journal pinpoints as decisive the moment when Mr. Cameron forgot about oranges and remembered an old Conservative theme:
Mr. Cameron has been wary of Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy, and understandably needs to find his own identity. But some old Tory ideas, such as low taxes, are proven winners. When Mr. Cameron called for lower taxes at the party conference last fall, his polls shot up and Mr. Brown got cold feet about early elections. That was the beginning of this Tory comeback.
So let’s indulge in a jot and tittle of optimism. Europe has often been a leading indicator for our elections. Margaret Thatcher foreshadowed Ronald Reagan. Tony Blair’s slicing and dicing of Michael Howard’s Tories hinted at the GOP calamity in 2006. Now we have seen Nicolas Sarkozy and a reasonably conservative Droit sweep into power in France, Silvio Berlusconi return in Italy, and the Tories garner their biggest victory in local elections since recordkeeping began. More significantly, the Conservative turn-around in Britain took almost no time at all. Half a year ago, Labour was unbeatable; last Thursday, its share of the vote fell behind that of the comical Liberal Democrats.
It may seem like an overwhelming task to persuade American voters “to listen to conservatives advancing conservative thought again”, and it may be an impossible one. Unfortunately, many conservatives have been so demoralized that they haven’t been trying.
Just today, for instance, Slick Barry Obama once again declared that Iraq is hopeless and not worth saving: “If we cannot get the Iraqis to stand up in seven years, we are not going to get them to stand up in fourteen years or fifty-six years.” To that Jim Geraghty says nothing more than “I don’t like that answer, but I think it will resonate with many Americans.”
C’mon, Mr. Kerry Spot. Whether or not it resonates, Senator Obama’s insinuation is ridiculous. “Standing up” is what the Iraqi military has been doing in Basra and Sadr City, to an extent that surprises even its warmest sympathizers. That the likely Democratic Presidential candidate refuses to look at the facts on the ground is a measure of how tenaciously he and his party are committed to American impotence.
Given that the Bush Administration is strangely reticent about speaking up in its own defense, the rest of us should do out bit by vowing not to let Hill-Bama’s stale talking points pass by uncorrected. The history of the past eight years has become clouded by left-wing legendary, and the shrieking carriers of Bush Derangement Syndrome have drowned out rational discourse. Perhaps resistance is futile, but that’s no reason not to try. It wasn’t long ago that politics looked just as grim in the U.K.
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